With that he got up, carefully lifted an iron piece in the back of the stove, turned a key thus disclosed in the pipe, and so materially altered the mood of the fire that in a few moments it stopped smoking and crackled nicely.
"Did you ever, mamma!" cried the girls.

A juggler's feat could not have entertained them more.
"_If_ for a time, first off, you had someone in the house who had lived in this country, you'd get on first class," said the youth.
"But you know, my dears," Mrs.Rexford spoke to her daughters, forgetting the young man for a moment as before, "if I had not supposed that Eliza understood the stove I should have inquired of Principal Trenholme before now." "May I enquire where you got your help ?" asked the American.

"If she was from this locality she certainly ought to have comprehended the stove." "She is a native of the country." "As I say," he went on, with some emphasis, "if she comes from hereabouts, or further west, she ought to have understood this sort of a stove; but, on the other hand, if she comes from the French district, where they use only the common box stove, she would not understand this kind." He seemed to be absorbed entirely in the stove, and in the benefit to them of having a "help," as he called her, who understood it.
"I think she comes from the lumbering country somewhere near the St.
Lawrence," said Mrs.Rexford, examining the key in the stove-pipe.

She could not have said a moment before where Eliza had come from, but this phrase seemed to sum up neatly any remarks the girl had let fall about her father's home.
"_That_ accounts for it! Will you be kind enough to let me see her?
I could explain the mechanism of this stove to her in a few words; then you, ma'am, need have no further trouble." She said she should be sorry to trouble him.

If the key were all, she could explain it.
"Pardon me"-- he bowed again--"it is _not_ all.